PhD student Epigenetics of childhood neurodevelopment

Your goal as a PhD student will be to discover the cell types and epigenetic changes that explain the link between the circumstances in the womb during prenatal development and subsequent neurodevelopment in childhood. To this end you will collect, process and culture cells obtained around birth, generate epigenomics data for example using DNA methylation arrays, and manage data on childhood ADHD and autistic symptoms. Specifically, you will be involved in two studies. First, the Twinlife Study (https://en.twinlifestudy.info/ ), an ongoing study of identical twins who share a single placenta. This placenta is frequently not equally shared, leading to an unequal distribution of resources during development, and a disparate birthweight despite the twins being genetically identical. This translates into differences in neurodevelopment in childhood. You will study epigenetic patterns in various tissues and cell types collected at birth, including cord blood cells and multipotent MSCs and link these to data on ADHD and autistic symptoms. Second, you will make use of large population cohort data, to compare epigenetic patterns between different neonatal tissues (cord blood vs heel-prick derived blood in the first week of life), and test which tissue is more predictive of neurodevelopmental outcomes (e.g. ADHD diagnosis in childhood). You will be embedded in a multidisciplinary team of cell biologists, epigeneticists, epidemiologists, psychologists and clinicians.